The long, bipartisan history of dealing with immigrants harshly

Large-scale deportation of Mexican workers and their families was carried out in the 1930s.(Image: screenshot from YouTube video "NPR: A Tale of Deportation in the 1930s" - Lisa J. Ellwood, Indian Country Today)

ICT OPINION

Jul 11, 2019

Trump inherited an immigration system that left millions of undocumented people with few rights and a militarized southern border; but Trump has sharpened and hyper-charged punitive immigration policies says Anthony W. Fontes

Following a long history of more open and welcoming immigration policies, in the first half of the 20th-century U.S. attitudes toward immigration became increasingly restrictionist. Racism against immigrants of color drove immigration legislation, especially during economic downturns and political turmoil.

Beginning in 1924, the government set national immigration quotas. Due to a belief in eugenics, a pseudo-science claiming that Nordic and Anglo-Saxon races are superior to all others, the authorities effectively cut off legal immigration from all but a few Western European nations.

Lawmakers claimed it was for the sake of preserving and improving upon the nation’s ethno-linguistic heritage as recorded in the 1890 census. The count excluded most African Americans and all Chinese Americans.

But once the Great Depression began and unemployment soared, President Herbert Hoover bowed to popular pressure to preserve “American jobs for real Americans” and approved the large-scale deportation of Mexican workers and their families.

Largely carried out by local law enforcement between 1929 and 1936, the deportation dragnets rounded up hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent – many of them U.S.-born citizens – and forced them onto trains bound for Mexico.

The advent of World War II reignited longstanding anti-Japanese attitudes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration forced nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent – most of them U.S. citizens – into remote internment camps between 1942 and 1945. His administration also deported thousands of Japanese Americans who had renounced their citizenship under duress. And the government turned away at least 200,000 Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazis despite the quotas for their countries not being filled.

World War II also revived the U.S. economy, suddenly creating labor shortages in jobs left by those who had joined the war effort. Looking south for a fix, lawmakers established the Bracero program. It encouraged and regulated the flow of Mexican migrants primarily employed as farm workers from 1942 until 1965 – when a landmark immigration law abolished national quotas.

Many employers preferred to hire undocumented workers to avoid the Bracero program’s bureaucracy and wage restrictions. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower initiated “Operation Wetback” to force hundreds of thousands of low-paid farm workers to leave the country.

Like Hoover’s deportation spree, officials made little effort to differentiate between the U.S. citizens and non-citizens who got rounded up and deported. Historians have found that innumerable U.S.-born people were again among the hundreds of thousands supposedly repatriated to Mexico.

Large numbers of Central Americans first began to arrive in the U.S. in the 1980s – in many cases fleeing U.S.-backed brutality. Rather than acknowledge its allies’ human rights abuses, the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush labeled these asylum seekers “economic migrants.” Less than 3% were granted asylum, a fraction of the approval rate for refugees fleeing communist regimes in Eastern Europe and oppression in Iran and Afghanistan.

Even so, Reagan also demonstrated generosity toward undocumented migrants. His administration’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act provided amnesty for over 3 million undocumented immigrants – the vast majority of them from Mexico and Central America – letting them become permanent legal residents.

The 1986 law also took major steps to toughen border security to deter future undocumented migration. Combining legalization with deterrence, Reagan hoped, would fix the nation’s immigration system once and for all.

Aside from the complementary measures adopted during the the first Bush presidency, no president since Reagan has signed legislation for another expansive amnesty for the undocumented. With few exceptions, immigration policies have become increasingly punitive with the passage of time.

More than any other president, Bill Clinton paved the way for Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented families, terrify others into voluntarily departing and slash legal migration. During his 1996 reelection campaign, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, one of the most draconian and far-reaching pieces of anti-immigration legislation in U.S. history.

The 1996 law eroded due process for many migrants seeking asylum. It created a program that enlists local law enforcement agencies into immigration enforcement. Critics of the program say it drives a wedge between the police and immigrant communities, interfering with law enforcement.

Anthony W. Fontes, Assistant Professor of Human Security, American University School of International Service, is a human geographer and ethnographer. His scholarship focuses on theories of violence, illicit economies, prison worlds, immigration, and Latin America.

For the last 7 years, Professor Fontes’ research has explored the evolution of transnational gangs, or maras, to understand how they became Central America’s public enemy #1. His work maps the blurred boundaries between the underworld, the state, law-abiding society, and legacies of civil war that have made the region the most violent non-combat zone in the world. The book based on this research is entitled Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City, (University of California Press 2018).

Fontes is also engaged in research projects on US immigration politics and on trafficking networks straddling Guatemala’s border with Mexico. His work has been supported by grants from the OSF/SSRC Drugs, Security, and Democracy Program, the International Center for Global Conflict and Cooperation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Disclosure statement: Anthony W. Fontes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.